Monday, 16 October 2017

Harare City Council (HCC ) is on a drive to abolish
estimate billing by replacing malfunctioning water meters with conventional
meters.

This comes as residents have long complained about being
overcharged through estimate billing, a concern which has been partly addressed
by the introduction of prepaid water meters.

In an interview with
the Daily News last week, HCC spokesperson Michael Chideme said council wanted
to do away with estimating water consumption and subsequent billing.

“We have been replacing old and malfunctioning meters with
new ones in the different suburbs. The idea is to make residents who had
malfunctioning meters to pay for their water. We also targeted those who did
not have meters either through vandalism or removal by council,” he said.

Chideme added that
conventional meters were cheaper to install and replace compared to prepaid
meters which is why they embarked on the exercise.

The city spokesperson also said while they were replacing
conventional meters with similar ones, it was not a deviation from the prepaid
meter installation programme.

“We will still go ahead with the idea of prepaid meters,
however, not everyone will have them. In some suburbs, conventional meters will
remain,” Chideme said.

In Harare’s pre-budget consultative meetings with the
business community, council finance director Tendai Kwenda said they intended
to instal 100 000 prepaid water meters in Harare’s high density suburbs by
December.

Kwenda said the
project will be targeting areas that already have a constant water supply, with
council having already installed more than 2 000 meters in Marimba, Sunningdale
and parts of Westgate.

“The pilot phase has been completed and was successful. We
will roll-out the meters in Kuwadzana and Westlea first and expand as we
monitor the availability of water supply in different suburbs,” Kwenda said.

German firm, GIZ,
released a report in 2015 titled “Assessment and Opportunities of Prepaid
Metering Systems in Zimbabwean Municipalities”, which showed that Zimbabwe’s
local authorities were not yet ready to implement smart meters on a wide scale.

The World Bank has also warned that prepaid water meters
may not be the solution to local authorities’ financial woes, as it would take
a long time to recover the costs of installing the pricey gadgets.

Conventional meters
cost between $30 and $50 while the prepaid ones will set back the city between
$150 and $210 per unit. Daily News